Greetings
Thanks for your help Fuel rats and to Rockslice especially.
3kly from the bubble I run out of fuel due to a seemingly never ending run of unscoopables and I didn't know about the star type filter, doh.
Anyway I was on my way back from Sag A , around 70000 ly trip and I run out of fuel 3kly from home and I would have lost all that data.
So big thanks ,really appreciate the help.
Btw when the fuel transfer was taking place sparks started flying and my hull went from 96% to 55% which caused me to panic , can anyone explain what happened.

Glad they could help, nothing worse than running out of fuel. There is a field of unscoopables at that distance just at the same height as Sol, go up or down to avoid in future .

40% loss in a few seconds sounds familiar from some other rescue....Over-enthusiastic rats sending too many limpets at once I suspect.
PSA to all rats. If the client is not moving multiple limpets will clog up around the clients cargo hatch and do serious damage! Fire one at a time unless its a code red and oxygen is going out in which case get that first fuel limpet in there!

PSA to all rats. If the client is not moving multiple limpets will clog up around the clients cargo hatch and do serious damage!

This is documented in our rescue procedures. Anyone who wants to call themself a Fuel Rat should know better than to have made such an embarassing mistake.

Edit: SOP is for the fuel rat to point their ship toward the client, and slowly reverse (doesn't need to be going very fast at all!) have the client follow, then fire the limpets backward at them. When the limpets are done refuelling, they fall away behind the client and explode harmlessly. Also: don't spam limpets; take your time and fire a new limpet when the previous is done transferring fuel. You do not need a big expensive refuel limpet controller; just fire one at a time and only have one in the air at a time.

My personal SoP is to fire one limpet as soon as i'm in range (to make sure there's enough fuel to power systems) and then wait for the client to power up their shields before sending more. If they don't have shields i advise them to thrust up to get away from the collection below them.

And i agree that controllers that fire two or more limpets at once are a bad idea; the 1D is all you need, or 1A if you're feeling flush (or want the range for instant limpet delivery as soon as you drop into the instance).

40% loss in a few seconds sounds familiar from some other rescue....Over-enthusiastic rats sending too many limpets at once I suspect.
PSA to all rats. If the client is not moving multiple limpets will clog up around the clients cargo hatch and do serious damage! Fire one at a time unless its a code red and oxygen is going out in which case get that first fuel limpet in there!

Sorry about that, xxThe_Dice_manxx. Still a bit new to ratting, and forgot about that...

This is documented in our rescue procedures. Anyone who wants to call themself a Fuel Rat should know better than to have made such an embarassing mistake.

Edit: SOP is for the fuel rat to point their ship toward the client, and slowly reverse (doesn't need to be going very fast at all!) have the client follow, then fire the limpets backward at them. When the limpets are done refuelling, they fall away behind the client and explode harmlessly. Also: don't spam limpets; take your time and fire a new limpet when the previous is done transferring fuel. You do not need a big expensive refuel limpet controller; just fire one at a time and only have one in the air at a time.

For anyone curious why we wrote this into the SOP; limpets 3d skin is just a smaller version of a regular container. That means that it can bounce off of ships, shields, space hamburgers, etc. When the client isn't moving, the first limpet will deliver cargo, move away and "burst." This does not mean it has been removed from space; the used limpet now takes on a burned out cargo skin. if the second limpet is fired in quick succession, it will generally bump into the first one on its way to the cargo hold. If you target the 2nd limpet, you can see it take slight dmg before it reaches the client's cargo hold. The 2nd limpet will deliver fuel, float away and "burst" creating more space debris.
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Any more than 2 limpets fired at a client without them moving will cause this debris to damage a ship's hull due to the 3rd limpet knocking the first two near to the ship. Shields will protect the client just like shields will protect you if you bounce a container off your ship.
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Bottomline: especially in multiple rat situations, advise the client to move a bit in any direction if more than 2 limpets are fired. Following the SOP will also prevent damage.

For anyone curious why we wrote this into the SOP; limpets 3d skin is just a smaller version of a regular container. That means that it can bounce off of ships, shields, space hamburgers, etc. When the client isn't moving, the first limpet will deliver cargo, move away and "burst." This does not mean it has been removed from space; the used limpet now takes on a burned out cargo skin. if the second limpet is fired in quick succession, it will generally bump into the first one on its way to the cargo hold. If you target the 2nd limpet, you can see it take slight dmg before it reaches the client's cargo hold. The 2nd limpet will deliver fuel, float away and "burst" creating more space debris.
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Any more than 2 limpets fired at a client without them moving will cause this debris to damage a ship's hull due to the 3rd limpet knocking the first two near to the ship. Shields will protect the client just like shields will protect you if you bounce a container off your ship.
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Bottomline: especially in multiple rat situations, advise the client to move a bit in any direction if more than 2 limpets are fired. Following the SOP will also prevent damage.

While that's not entirely true (I once fired four limpets at once and had no problem, you just need to wait for them to drift away enough for the second to have a clear path, or make the rescuee spin his ship to change approach vectors ; sometimes limpets gets locked UNDER shield and grind until your rescuee is dust...) I won't ever ask you to remove a layer of security to the SOP.

As some of you know, I've been appointed "Fuel Rat Respresentative to the Player Group Initiative" and as such have gained insight into another dimension... access to knowledge beyond compair a special forum where we discuss Player Groups and how best to improve upon that idea ; and by that I mean what can Player Groups do to improve the ED experience for all and how can Frontier help Player Groups in that endeavour. Some of that information is publicly available on these forums, some of it is restricted to the place I was refering above.

As I am but a single Rat and as such cannot squeak for the more than 500 Rats (and one Cheer-Leader, wink wink) of different tastes and opinion that make up this Mischief ; and I know some of you are pretty opinionated on things, have a strong will and sometime opposing viewpoints (someone said Aisling's better than Arissa, pshe !) and such, I come to you today with some kind of Reader's Digest from the Forum.
I cannot go into details (as it could be boring, I don't wan't copy paste a whole forum section, and maybe I shouldn't be doing this because it is a restricted forum part) but here's what we've discussed so far :

Group Definition : What's a Private Group, a Player Group, how do they interact, what are their goal and motivations...

Group Management Tools : Group creation and naming, Ranks (Founder/Leader, Officers...), Group Icons on the GalMap... Paint Jobs, Decals

Group Activities : PvP, PvE, Community Goals, Events...

Wishlist for the User Interface : Group Chat (like local chat), meet-up point setting (to arrange rendez-vous with Groupmates)...

It seems Player Groups are now called Player Faction, and this brings me to another point I'd like to raise with you Rats. If you look at some systems (PHIAGRE is the first that comes to mind) in the galaxy map, you'll see a description about the player group "residing" there. We have played around with the idea of making FUELUM our home because that's the only system in the whole game that you can find by typing "fuel" in the search bar, it has an anarchic faction called the FUELUM CREW that we could maybe ask to be renamed "Fuelum Rats". It's also on the border of Imperial and federal spaces, is not far from Sol, has a Coriolis... So my question to you guys is : should we make FUELUM our official home ?

Also, I've seen on that forum that some groups have more than one representative. As we are a very diverse gathering of people, I thought it would be nice to have someone with a different viewpoint to maybe join me in my Propaganda Campaign so as to better represent this Glorious Mischief of ours. I know some people are interested but there was to be more takers I'd like to know.

Oh yeah, nearly forgot. Today we had the first Skype Conference between Frontier and the Player Groups. It was mostly to organize things (how often do we meet, exchange business cards, send Fuel Rats Mugs to The CODE...) but I managed to get two informations that are worth knowing :

Instancing is here to stay. For now, it's the way the game was designed and it would require a lot of code rework to address this issue. The devs "are looking into it" but don't expect a solution in the near future (I'd not raise my hopes for Horizons either)

Credit Transfer between Players is not coming soon. This is something they're considering but it's a system that could be abused really fast so they are thinking how best to address that as well.

Everything else we spoke about was organizing stuff for upcoming Events (you may have heard about "The Mayhem" happening on the Stress Test, there are some pretty nifty things planned Community-Wise and Lore-Wise, but we didn't get any specifics nor the impression Frontier had specifics to share to begin with.

God I hope I'm not breaking any implicit agreement not to say anything.

My thoughts as a half-dormant rat that spends more time on the forums than in game.

I'm more than happy for you to broad stroke it, no need to copy it all if you're going to do the hard work of gathering the information into easy to read bullet points
As Surly and many others have said we don't really fall into the standard group category. We are not grouped for our own gains and often don't meet outside of rescues except for the occasional rendezvous at 30,000Ly from Sol to pass limpets across...

For the management tools/user interface/activities:
-I've mentioned before a re-fuelling CG would be epic if it could be coded. Re-fuel Jaques station, re-fuel a capital ship etc. I expect it would also be fun to watch unaware players sending the last of their fuel as a CG contribution and having to call us to help Ooh, we could even set up a limpet chain to give 1 person crazy contributions!
-A way to add everyone in the group to your friends list at once so that I can add every rat instead of doing it part way into a rescue if I haven't raced or rescued with them before.
-We could maybe organise an event to get to Barnards loop without fuel scoops although after the neospike rescue it all seems kind of tame in my head...

Fuelem as capital, yes. To be honest it really doesn't matter where since as above we don't really meet outside of rescues. As you say there are good reasons to make our unofficial home official.

On the whole multiple points of contact I'd say 3 would be absolute max. From my past experience any more and the message gets crossed, diluted or over-emphasised. I'd be willing to help out but as above I'm not on the rats site and in game as much as I'd like although I am pretty much on here most of the time and I do like to comment
I'd also be very happy not to do it if there are others that are willing, especially more active people within the group. Put me down as a "if no one else wants to"..

I had some thoughts about instancing the other day, which I didn't have time to mention (other RL crisis intervened) If someone is interested in thinking this through more, be my guest. This is all kind of half-formed.

When we encounter instancing problems in a CASE RED our usual reaction has been to carpet bomb the area with rats, bounce everyone's connections and hope for the best. I believe that is PLAN C or maybe PLAN D. That may not be the best option, actually. Here's what occurred to me: it appears the matchmaking service may be trying to assign people to instances based on things like network speed and protocols reachable through firewalls, etc. Could it be possible that more rats in the scene make for a higher likelihood that the rats will group in the instance and the client will be determined not to be as compatible? Imagine if we had 3 fuel rats with good high speed connections, and a client with a kind of sketchy ping-time. Might be that the matchmaker server would keep grouping the rats in the same instance and pushing the client to their own. Boom. Dead.

What I guess I am thinking is something like this: next time we have a clear set of instancing problems amd nobody is dying of lack of air, maybe we should poll the client about the speed and quality of their connection, whether they have weird NAT devices or firewalls, etc. Then - instead of dropping multiple rats on them, try dropping just one rat that has the closest comparable connection speed and type (i.e.: group the guys on FIOS or whatever) I bet that if we knew more about the compatability decisions the matchmaking server performs, we could game it and pick and choose who got in instance and who didn't. Maybe PLAN C should be a one-rat attempt with a speed/compatible rat. Just a thought. I have no idea how FD coded this thing.

On another topic re: groups - it'd be neat if we had the option to be visible to our group. That way fuel rats could all tell where other fuel rats are. It'd make dispatcher's job less exciting, I suppose. So who needs that?

Trolling --

One other thing .... I had this thought the other day when the events were in train, but I didn't have time to write my usual text-wall because I had to bolt out of the door. Anyway:

I was in #FuelRats and a CMDR came in and fired the ratsignal. Our dispatcher pulled together a rescue and started vectoring several refuellers toward the client, as per SOP. Then, the client declared CASE RED. How exciting! The dispatcher and the fuel rats amped up their game and buckled down to the rescue and ... the client warned that they were low on battery power. In spite of the dispatcher and myself telling them (me, playing "bad cop" by increasing my surliness level) the client kept doing really dumb stuff like logging back in to check their vector from the star, etc. They seemed either confused or stupid. Meanwhile, in #RatChat the dispatcher and some of the other rats were doing the Fuel Rat equivalent of /facepalming about the client. The possibility that the client was trolling us was raised. We couldn't collectively decide if we just had an egregiously goofy client, or someone deliberately being annoying. Then, the client said they were low on battery life. And in spite of being told by our dispatcher to get out of game (GPUs suck up electricity) the client kept logging in to check stuff, etc. It was extremely suspicious. And - sure enough - the client then said their laptop battery had drained and they were logged out and would come back tomorrow. Meanwhile 3 fuel rats were sitting in-system with the client, ready to rescue them.

It was a troll.

But that doesn't matter. Why? Because the Fuel Rats involved handled it amazingly professionally. They just went to go deal with the situation, and were standing by ready to be awesome. The dispatcher was (no doubt!) shaking their head in perplexity, but dispatch kept focused, kept calm, and kept on doing the right thing. In fact, since I was on the sidelines and not dispatch, I was the only Fuel Rat present who said anything critical to the client about their behavior. I was, perhaps, less tactful than I could have been but I didn't get too surly, and dispatch kept the situation cool in spite of my deliberately playing "bad cop."

My point: if it were a drill, that was one of the best-run cleanest drills ever. The troll did a great job of pretending to be a clueless git. You probably have to be a pretty clueless git to do such a great performance. The Fuel Rats did everything exactly right, though.

And that's why I felt I needed to post about this incident. I try hard to remind myself that the Fuel Rats are an emergent phenomenon, but I did feel an amazing surge of almost paternal pride. Watching out evolved system and practices work so well, and watching a bunch of people who take time out their game for no reason other than the glory of the deed - going out of their way to help someone who was trying to waste their time - it was glorious. The dispatcher and the rats in the scenario were a fountain of awesomeness that the poor little troll simply could not irritate. Below the awesome, there was: more awesome. I was, seriously, having problems with some grit that had gotten in my remaining beady eye, and had to blot it with a kleenex. Once.

Frequently on the internet, I see people say "don't feed the trolls." Well, I learned a new thing that day. Which is simply that you can overwhelm a troll with awesome. By just doing your thing so well and thoroughly that they realize that they're wasting their time and they're just another successful exercise in your book.

Frequently on the internet, I see people say "don't feed the trolls." Well, I learned a new thing that day. Which is simply that you can overwhelm a troll with awesome. By just doing your thing so well and thoroughly that they realize that they're wasting their time and they're just another successful exercise in your book.

Same as when a few of us were in Sol on a similar incident. Personally speaking, I have already committed an amount of my game time to Rat Duty and so they are only people who have time wasted, which appeals to my sense of irony.